74A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONabstracted icon, the Platonic idea, to a material level that is closer to the
animal and further away from language, to a register of realism that im-
peaches scientific discourse.
Fairnington thus turned to the very tools through which realism op-
erates. He photographed museum specimens with the aid of a micro-
scope, capturing the damages, imperfection, and discolorations that over
time have affected the surface of selected animal bodies. But unlike
Audubon, Fairnington had no interest in representationally resurrecting
his animals. His insects remained well dead. Stark against the neutral
background of natural history illustration, these damaged specimens un-
comfortably posed as themselves: a Caravaggesque memento mori in
which decay metaphorically returns the specimen to an imperfect dimen-
sion of bio-interconnectedness.
This ontological quivering proposed by Fairnington is further prob-
lematized by the conceptual overlay of artistic media inscribed in
the final work. His paintings of animal specimens always derive from
photographs—sometimes from multiple, collaged photographs. Through
this process, the artist engages in a complex dialogue with the idiomatic
nature of these media, and their relationships with nature, realism, and
ultimately epistemology.
The level of realism defining his early paintings is brutal—broken legs,
torn wings, and entomological pins transfixing bodies were all accurately
documented. Likewise, his taxidermy study-skins of birds of paradise
produce a difficult-to-negotiate tension between the beauty of the plum-
age and the flattened body of the birds. Refusing to resurrect, embellish,
and perfect, the artist deliberately blurs the boundaries between the most
regularly attributed subjectivity of painting and the presumed realistic
objectivity of photography by problematically intertwining their idioms.
As a result, his images uncomfortably sit in the gap between seeing and
saying: the rupture between the world, the presumed realism with which
we represent it, our perception of it, and the possibility of articulating
such perception.
Fairnington’s paintings insert themselves in the history of opticality
of natural history, leveraging the moment of implementation of photog-
raphy’s mechanical eye in scientific inquiry. By reversing the historical
order in which these media constructed the real of natural history, in his
use of photography before painting Fairnington positions himself as an